DARPA Announces $2 Billion in Funding for 'AI Next' Campaign

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will spend more than $2 billion over the next few years on research into "third wave" artificial intelligence capabilities.

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to spend more than $2 billion on research into "third wave" artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities over the next few years.

The AI Next initiative aims to advance AI beyond the point where it requires large volumes of training data, and to bring the technology closer to human intelligence in adapting to change.

DARPA's Steven Walker says, "We want to explore how machines can acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them."

AI Next's priority areas include automating U.S. Department of Defense business tasks and improving the security of machine learning technology.

The initiative also will utilize DARPA's Artificial Intelligence Exploration funding program, which gives researchers 18 months to prove an AI theory is viable.